Friday, September 03, 2010

Coming soon: the dumbest author reading Q and A questions of all time

How many times have you gone to an author's reading at a book store and heard someone ask a question that made you want to crawl under your chair? Groan? Cover your ears? Flee the store? Cry? Move to another neighborhood?

There's one in every crowd -- that one person who's got to raise his hand and ask Alice Munro if she's related to Marilyn. Personally, I think these questions -- and the responses -- are often the most revealing part of a Q and A because they reveal more about authors' personalities, their capacity for empathy, and their ability to think on their feet, than any of the usual questions.

I'm putting together a partial list of the daffiest Q and A questions of all time --- and no, I won't spare myself on this list because I've asked a few staggeringly dumb questions to authors over the years, including a question to Janet Malcolm that was so confounding, even to me, that she couldn't answer at all. She just stared at me. And after a while, I think she said: "Next question?''

So far I've got a list of teeth-grinding questions that people have asked to Toni Morrison, Joan Didion and others.

About Me

My name is Dan White. I am the contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. I write essays for the magazine as well as Q & A's with authors including T.C. Boyle, Lawrence Weschler, Susan Shillinglaw, Aspen Matis and Gail Storey, to name a few (along with a brief piece about the work of Frank Gehry.) My first book is called The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail and was published by HarperCollins. It was a California indie bookstore bestseller and a Los Angeles Times "Discovery" selection. My second book (also nonfiction) is in progress and under contract with Henry Holt & Co. and should be out in a couple of years. My work for UC Santa Cruz includes stories about earthquakes and droughts as well as in-depth conversations with Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Nikki Giovanni among others. The email for this blog dwhitescruz(at)yahoo(dot)com
Stay tuned for an author's website.